What’s Better, Online Charity Auctions or Live Event? Why Not Both!
Live charity auctions have been used to raise money for charity since the beginning of time. They are a great way to raise money, and a way to attract more and more people to your cause. Even if someone doesn’t buy anything, they still can donate. But live events come with problems!
Problems with Live Charity Auctions
When setting up and planning a live charity auction event, you will spend hundreds of hours getting ready. You need to find a place to host your event, gather your volunteers, and find donors to donation auction items. This takes time and money and that is why most non profit organization only runs one event per year.
On the day of your event you need to make sure as many people show up as possible. Because the amount of donations you receive all depends on how many people show up. These days everyone seams to have less and less time on their hands. Making it to a live charity auction event is not always possible. So what do we do?
Run an Online Charity Auction
Online auction are an easy way to run charity events all year long. Now, I don’t suggest your stop running a live event. But I do suggest you add online auctions to the mix. You can run online auction two ways, for pre bidding to your live event or as a charity event on it own. Lets go over both.
Online Auction for Pre Bidding
By adding online pre bidding to your live event, you give everyone that cant attend the opportunity to still bid. By starting your pre bidding one or two weeks before the live event, you will receive more bids. By the time of your live event, your bids could be higher then if people just started bidding that night. Instead of giving your visitors just a couple hours to bid, you can give those people weeks to think about the items. It almost becomes an obsession, the more they think about your items, the more they must have it. If they get out bid online, they will be more prepared to bid even higher at the live event because they must have that item. It’s a win-win for all.
Online Auction Only
Running just an online auction only, you run everything the same way as the pre bidding but at the end of the auction, the highest bidder wins and your auction is over. The biggest benefit of an online auction is you can run several auction in a year for only one price. All you need to do is have auction items ready and post them in your fundraising storefront. Once in your items are posted, you can open your auction to bidders.
When you use the online charity auction software we offer, you will be able to run online auctions, sell tickets to your live events, collect donations through your store and much more. If you would like to test drive our powerful software, we offer a Free Fundraising Learning Center account that you can use to setup mock auction and get hundreds of free fundraising ideas.